Marketers use forms as a data collection tool to get a better picture of their audience. At the same time, forms can also facilitate customer transactions with your organization, for example:

Signing up for newsletter, demos, free trials

Registering for special events and seminars.

Managing account preferences (the frequency and content a certain audience is interested in)

Gating content in exchange for contact data

Well Eloqua makes it super easy to create a form, so let’s take a look:

Basic Settings:

Click the ‘assets’ tab from the homepage and choose ‘forms’. There are two options for you; either create a blank form or integrate an external form. I chose create a form here which then takes you to template chooser. Choose a blank form or use an existing template.

First you will need to name the form and decide the overall settings of the form. Simply click the little arrow located on the right top of the screen, and click settings

Form creation

Now there are three main parts on the screen: the tool bar, the work area, and the configuration panel.

First, taking a look at the left side of the screen, there are three purple icons called ‘Contact Fields’, ‘Custom Fields’, and ‘Field Groups’.

Choose the tool bar to select the fields you want for your form. In the screenshot, below I dragged ‘First Name’ ‘Last Name’ and ‘Email Address’ into the form.

Then, moving on to the ‘Custom Fields’, there are many different formats you can choose from that give your audience the ability to interact with your forms in different ways, including ‘Single Line Text’ ‘Paragraph Text’ and many others. I dragged the ‘Single Check Box’:

The last one, ‘Field Groups’, is a collection of commonly grouped fields. But we will explore this later on.

*At the bottom of those three, there is an icon called ‘Progressive Profile’, which will send the audience another form to fill out when they have given certain responses. (You know, to further collect useful data or to remind the audience about an event).

Customize the filed

Next, when you click into any field, it will take you to the field settings on the right. You can customize the field instructions, size, and data types.

By clicking the validation tab button, you can select the box to make the blank required or that it must contain an email address, among other criteria as you can see below.

The next step in creating a good form is to click the pre-population tab, and specify the text field that you want to appear on the field when opened. You can provide a static value, such as an email address for example. Or you can use a field merge, and pre-populate the field if it is an already known contact in your database so that a returning customer would not need to retype the information again.

Also you can use the field label and field instruction to give your audiences instructions with more clarity of what you need them to fill out. You also can drag the field to put the boxes in whatever order necessary to make the form more logical for the audience.

In the end, remember to keep your from short, clean and easy to read. Putting in the work on the front end makes the customer experience much better because it makes the interaction with your company easy. Oh, and don’t forget to save the form so all of the work you put in doesn’t go to waste!

Share this entry

https://i2.wp.com/sfcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Create-a-Form.png?fit=569%2C201201569Will Zhaohttp://sfcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/logo.pngWill Zhao2017-06-13 13:50:002017-06-13 14:14:57Eloqua From Best Practice: The First Step to Knowing Your Customer

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.